History research essay

Document #2 of 3 (Brooks, “Total War” in World War Z)

Guiding Questions:

1. How does “the book of war,” or the nature of warfare, change when you are faced with 200 million zombies?

2. What was the role of dogs in the total war against zombies? 3. Why did Siberia become a “religious state”? 4. Were aquatic zombies a threat? How would you combat them?

WORLD

WAR

MAX BROOKS

B\D\W\Y BROADWAY BOOKS

NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual.persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely

coincidental.

Copyright© 2006 by Max Brooks

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the

Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B \ D \ W \ Y, are registered trademarks of

Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United

States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006, and subsequently

in paperback in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint

of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,

New York, in 2007.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

BroQks, Max.

World War Z : an oral history of the zombie war/ Max Brooks.-lst ed.

1. War-Humor. I. Title.

PN6231. W28B76 2006

813' .6-dc22

2006009517

ISBN 978-0-307-34661-2

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Maria Elias

50 49 48 4 7 46 45 44

First Paperback Edition

For Henry Michael Brooks,

who makes me want to change the world

TOTAL WAR

ABOARD THE MAURO ALTIERI,

THREE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE VAALAJARVI, FINLAND

II stand next to General D'Ambrosia in the CIC, the Combat Infor­

mation Center, of Europe's answer to the massive U.S. 0-29 com­

mand and control dirigible. The crew work silently at their

glowing monitors. Occasionally, one of them speaks into a head­

set, a quick, whispered acknowledgment in French, German, Span­

ish, or Italian. The general leans over the video chart table,

watching the entire operation from the closest thing to a God's­

eye view.I

"Attack"-when I first heard that word, my gut reaction was "oh shit."

Does that surprise you?

[Before I can answer ... I

WORLD WAR Z 271

Sure it does. You probably expected "the brass" to be just champing at

the bit, all that blood and guts, "hold 'em by the nose while we kick 'em in

the ass" crap.

!Shakes his head.I I don't know who created the stereotype of the hard­ charging, dim-witted, high school football coach of a general officer. Maybe it was Hollywood, or the civilian press, or maybe we did it to ourselves by allowing those insipid, egocentric clowns-the MacArthurs and Halseys and Curtis E. LeMays-to define our image to the rest of the country. Point

is, that's the image of those in uniform, and it couldn't be further from the truth. I was scared to death of taking our armed forces on the offensive, more so because it wouldn't be my ass hanging out in the fire: I'd only be sending others out to die, and here's what I'd be sending them up against.

!He turns to another screen on the far wall, nodding to an oper­

ator, and the image dissolves into a wartime map of the conti­

nental United States.I

Two hundred million zombies 1 . Who can even visualize that type of

number, let alone combat it? At least this time around we knew what we were combating, but when you added up all the experience, all the data we'd compiled on their origin, their physiology, their strengths, their weaknesses, their motives, and their mentality, it still presented us with a very gloomy prospect for victory.

T he book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped an­ other, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.

All armies, be they mechanized or mountain guerilla, have to abide by three basic restrictions: they have to be bred, fed, and led. Bred: you need warm bodies, or else you don't have an army; fed: once you've got that army, they've got to be supplied; and led: no matter how decentralized that fighting force is, there has to be someone among them with the authority

1. It has been confirmed at least twenty-five million of this number include reanimated refugees from Latin America who were killed attempting to reach the Canadian north.

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to say "follow me." Bred, fed, and led; and none of these restrictions applied to the living dead.

Did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Remarque paints a vivid picture of Germany becoming "empty," meaning that toward the end of the war, they were simply running out of soldiers. You can fudge the numbers, send the old men and little boys, but eventually you're going to hit the ceiling .. . unless every time you killed an enemy, he came back to life on your side. That's how Zack operated, swelling his ranks by thinning ours! And it only worked one way. Infect a human, he becomes a zombie. Kill a zombie, he becomes a corpse. We could only get weaker, while they might actually get stronger.

All human armies need supplies, this army didn't. No food, no ammo, no fuel, not even water to drink or air to breathe! There were no logistics lines to sever, no depots to destroy. You couldn't just surround and starve them out, or let them "wither on the vine." Lock a hundred of them in a room and three years later they'll come out just as deadly.

It's ironic that the only way to kill a zombie is to destroy its brain, be­ cause, as a group, they have no collective brain to speak of. There was no leadership, no chain of command, no communication or cooperation on any level. There was no president to assassinate, no HQ bunker to surgi­ cally strike. Each zombie is its own, self-contained, automated unit, and this last advantage is what truly encapsulates the entire conflict.

You've heard the expression "total war"; it's pretty common throughout human history. Every generation or so, some gasbag likes to spout about how his people have declared "total war" against an enemy, meaning that every man, woman, and child within his nation was committing every second of their lives to victory. That is bullshit on two basic levels. First of all, no country or group is ever 100 percent committed to war; it's just not physically possible. You can have a high percentage, so many people work­ ing so hard for so long, but all of the people, all of the time? What about the malingerers, or the conscientious objectors? What about the sick, the injured, the very old, the very young? What �bout when you're sleeping, eating, taking a shower, or taking a dump? Is that a "dump for victory"?

WORLD WAR Z 2 73

That's the first reason total war is impossible for humans. The second is that all nations have their limits. There might be individuals within that group who are willing to sacrifice their lives; it might even be a relatively high number for the population, but that population as a whole will even­ tually reach its maximum emotional and physiological breaking point. The Japanese reached theirs with a couple of American atomic bombs. The Vietnamese might have reached theirs if we'd dropped a couple more,2 but, thank all holy Christ, our will broke before it came to that. That is the na­ ture of human warfare, two sides trying to push the other past its limit of endurance, and no matter how much we like to talk about total war, that limit is always there ... unless you're the living dead.

For the first time in history, we faced an enemy that was actively waging total war. They had no limits of endurance. They would never negotiate, never surrender. They would fight until the very end because, unlike us, every single one of them, every second of every day, was devoted to con­ suming all life on Earth. That's the kind of enemy that was waiting for us beyond the Rockies. That's the kind of war we had to fight.

DENVER, COLORADO, USA

[We have just finished dinner at the Wainios. Allison, Todd's

wife, is upstairs helping their son, Addison, with his homework.

Todd and I are downstairs in the kitchen, doing the dishes.I

It was kinda like stepping back in time, the new army, I mean. It couldn't have been any more different from the one I'd fought, and almost died with, at Yonkers. We weren't mechanized anymore-no tanks, no

2. It has been alleged that several members of the American military establishment openly supported the use of thermonuclear weapons during the Vietnam conflict.

274 MAX BROOKS

arty, no tread jobs1 at all, not even the Bradleys. Those were still in reserve, being modified for when we'd have to take back the cities. No, the only wheeled vehicles we had, the Humvees and a few M-trip-Seven ASV s,2

were used to carry ammo and stuff. We hoofed it, all the way, marching in column like you see in Civil War paintings. There was a lot of references to "the Blue" versus "the Gray," mainly because of Zack's skin color and the shade of our new BDUs. They didn't bother with camo schemes anymore; in any case, what was the point? And, I guess, navy blue was the cheapest dye they had back then. The BDU itself looked more like a SWAT team's coverall. It was light and comfortable and interwoven with Kevlar, I think it was Kevlar,3 bite-proof threads. It had the option of gloves and a hood that would cover your whole face. Later, in urban hand-to-hand, that op­ tion saved a lot of lives.

Everything had kind of a retro feel about it. Our Lobos looked like something out of, I don't know, Lord of the Rings? Standard orders were to use it only when necessary, but, trust me, we made it necessary a lot. It just felt good, you know, swingin' that solid hunk a' steel. It made it personal, empowering. You could feel the skull split. A real rush, like you were tak­ ing back your life, you know? Not that I minded pulling the trigger.

Our primary weapon was the SIR, standard infantry rifle. The wood fur­ niture made it look like a World War II gun; I guess composite materials were too hard to mass-produce. I'm not sure where the SIR supposedly came from. I've heard it was a madcap of the AK. I've also heard that it was a stripped-down version of the XM 8, which the army was already planning as its next-gen assault weapon. I've even heard that it was in­ vented, tested, and first produced during the siege of the Hero City, and the plans were transmitted to Honolulu. Honestly, I don't know, and I so don't care. It might have kicked hard, and it only fired on semi, but it was super accurate and it never, ever jammed! You could drag it through the mud, leave it in the sand, you could drop it in saltwater and let it sit there for days. No matter what you did to this baby1 it just wouldn't let you down.

1. Tread jobs: wartime slang for vehicles that traveled on treads. 2. M-trip-Seven: The Cadillac Gauge Mlll 7 Armored Security Vehicle. 3. The chemical composition of the army's battle dress uniform (BDU) is still classified.

WORLD WAR 2 275

The only bells and whistles it had was a conversion kit of extra parts, fur­ niture, and additional barrels of different lengths. You could go long-range sniper, midrange rifle, or close-combat carbine, all in the same hour, and without reaching farther than your ruck. It also had a spike, this little flip­ out job, about eight inches long, that you could use in a pinch if your Lobo wasn't handy. We used to joke "careful, you'll poke somebody's eye out," which, of course, we did plenty. The SIR made a pretty good close combat weapon, even without the spike, and when you add all the other things that made it so awesome, you can see why we always referred to it, respect­ fully, as "Sir."

Our staple ammo was the NATO 5.56 "Cherry PIE." PIE stands for pyro­ technically initiated explosive. Outstanding design. It would shatter on entry into Zack's skull and fragments would fry its brain. No risk of spread­ ing infected gray matter, and no need for wasteful bonfires. On BS4 duty, you didn't even have to decap before you buried them. Just dig the trench and roll the whole body in.

Yeah, it was a new army, as much the people as anything else. Recruit­ ment had changed, and being a grunt meant something very different now. You still had the old requirements-physical stamina, mental competence, the motivation and discipline to master difficult challenges in extreme conditions-but all that was mouse farts if you couldn't hack long-term Z-shock. I saw a lot of good friends just lose it under the strain. Some of them collapsed, some turned their weapons on themselves, some on their buddies. It didn't have anything to do with being brave or anything like that. I once read this British SAS survival guide that talked all about the "warrior" personality, how your family's supposed to be emotionally and fi­ nancially stable, and how you're not even supposed to be attracted to girls when you're real young. !Grunts.I Survival guides ... !Jerks his hand in a masturbatory movement.I

But the new faces, they could have been from anywhere: your neighbor, your aunt, that geeky substitute teacher, or that fat, lazy slob at the DMV. From former insurance salesmen to a guy who I'm damn sure was Michael

4. BS: Battlefield Sanitization.

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Stipe, although I never got him to admit it. I guess it all made sense; any­

one who couldn't roll wouldn't have made it this far in the first place. Everyone was already a veteran in some sense. My battle buddy, Sister Montoya, fifty-two years old, she'd been a nun, still was I guess. Five three and a buck even, she'd protected her whole Sunday school class for nine, days with nothing but a six-foot iron candlestick. I don't know how she

managed to hump that ruck, but she did, without complaining, from our

assembly area in Needles, all the way to our contact site just outside of

Hope, New Mexico.

Hope. I'm not kidding, the town was actually named Hope.

They say the brass chose it because of the terrain, clear and open with

the desert in front and the mountains in back. Perfect, they said, for an

opening engagement, and that the name had nothing to do with it. Right.

The brass really wanted this test-op to go smoothly. It'd be the first

major ground engagement we'd fought since Yonkers. It was that moment,

you know, like, when a lot of different things all come together.

Watershed?

Yeah, I think. All the new people, the new stuff, the new training, the new

plan-everything was supposed to sort of mix together for this one first big

kickoff.

We'd encountered a couple dozen Gs en route. Sniffer dogs would find

them, and handlers with silenced weapons would drop them. We didn't want

to attract too many till we were set. We wanted this to be on our terms.

We started planting our "garden": shelter stakes with orange Day-Glo

tape in rows every ten meters. They were our range markers, showing us

exactly where to zero our sights. For some of us there was also some light

duty like clearing the brush.or arranging the ammo crates.

For the rest of us, there was nothing to do except wait, just grab some

chow, recharge our camel packs, or even snag so�e bag time, if it was pos­

sible to sleep. We'd learned a lot since Yonkers. The brass wanted us rested.

The problem was, it gave us all too much time to think.

Did you see the movie, the one Elliot made about us? That scene with

WORLD WAR Z 277

the campfire and the grunts all jawing in this witty dialogue, the stories and the dreams for the future, and even that guy with the harmonica. Dude, it was so not like that. First of all, it was the middle of the day, no campfires, no harmonica under the stars, and also everyone was really quiet. You knew what everyone was thinking though, "What the hell are we doing here?" This was Zack's house now, and as far as we were concerned, he could have it. We'd all had plenty of pep talks about "The Future of the Human Spirit." We'd seen the president's speech God knows how many times, but the prez wasn't out here on Zack's front lawn. We had a good thing going behind the Rockies. What the hell were we doing out here?

Around 1300 hours, the radios started squawking, it was the K-handlers whose dogs had made contact. We locked and loaded and took our place on the firing line.

That was the centerpiece of our whole new battle doctrine, back into the past like everything else. We massed in a straight line, two ranks: one active, one reserve. The reserve was so when anyone in the front rank needed a weapon recharge, their fire wouldn't be missed on the line. The­ oretically, with everyone either firing or reloading, we could keep Zack falling as long as the ammo held out.

We could hear the barking, the Ks were bringing them in. We started seeing Gs on the horizon, hundreds. I started shaking even though it wasn't the first time I'd had to face Zack since Yonkers. I'd been in the clean and sweep operations in LA. I'd done my time in the Rockies when the sum­ mer thawed the passes. Each time I got major shakes.

The dogs were recalled, racing behind our lines. We switched over to our Primary Enticement Mechanism. Every army had one by now. The Brits would use bagpipes, the Chinese used bugles, the Sou'fricans used to smack their rifles with their assegais

5 and belt out these Zulu war chants.

For us, it was hard-core Iron Maiden. Now, personally, I've never been a metal fan. Straight classic rock's my thing, and Hendrix's "Driving South"

5. The assegai: An all-steel, multipurpose implement named after the traditional Zulu short spear.

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is about as heavy as I get. But I had to admit, standing there in that desert

wind, with "The Trooper" thumping in my chest, I got it. The PEM wasn't

really for Zack's benefit. It was to psych us up, take away some of Zack's

mojo, you know, "take the piss out," as the Brits say. Right about the time

Dickinson was belting "As you plunge into a certain death" I was pumped,

SIR charged and ready, eyes fixed on this growing, closing horde. I was,

like, "C'mon, Zack, let's fuckin' do this!"

Just before they reached the front range marker, the music began to

fade. The squad leaders shouted, "Front rank, ready!" and the first line

knelt. Then came the order to "take aim!" and then, as we all held our

breath, as the music clicked off, we heard "FIRE!"

The front rank just rippled, cracking like a SAW on full auto and drop­

ping every G that crossed the first markers. We had strict orders, only the

ones crossing the line. Wait for the others. We'd trained this way for

months. By now it was pure instinct. Sister Montoya raised her weapon

above her head the signal for an empty mag. We switched positions, I , 6

flipped off my safety, and sighted my first target. She was a noob, couldn't

have been dead more than a year or so. Her dirty blond hair hung in

patches from her tight, leathery skin. Her swollen belly puffed through a

faded black T-shirt that read o IS FOR GANGSTA. I centered my sight be­

tween her shrunken, milky blue eyes ... you know it's not really the eyes

that make them look all cloudy, it's actually tiny dust scratches on the sur­

face, thousands of them, because Zack doesn't make any tears. Those

scratched-up baby blues were looking right at me when I pulled the trigger.

The round knocked her on her back, steam coming from the hole in her

forehead. I took a breath, sighted my next target, and that was that, I was

locked in.

Doctrine calls for one shot every full second. Slow, steady, mechanical­

like.

!He begins snapping his fingers.I

6. Noob: Short for "newbies," zombies that have reanimated after the Great Panic.

WORLD WAR Z 279

On the rartge we practiced with metronomes, all the time the instruc­ tors saying "they ain't in no hurry, why are you?" It was a way of keeping calm, pacing yourself. We had to be as slow and robotic as them. "Out G the G," they used to say.

!His fingers snap in perfect rhythm.I

Shooting, switching, reloading, grabbing sips from your camel pack, grabbing clips from the "Sandlers."

Sandlers?

Yeah, the Recharge Teams, this special reserve unit that did nothing but make sure we never ran dry. You only had a certain number of clips on you and it would take a lot more time to reload each individual clip. The San­ dlers ran up and down the line collecting empty clips, recharging them from crated ammo, and then passing them out to anyone who signaled. The story is that when the army started training with RTs, one of the guys started doin' an Adam Sandler impression, you know, " Water Boy"-"Ammo Boy." The officers weren't too jazzed with the tag, but the Recharge Teams loved it. Sandlers were lifesavers, drilled like a fuckin' ballet. I don't think anyone that day or night ever found themselves one round short.

That night?

They just kept coming, full on Chain Swarm.

That's a large-scale attack?

More than that. One G sees you, comes after you, and moans. A click away, another G hears that moan, comes after it, and moans himself, then another one another click away, then another. Dude, if the area's thick enough, if the chain's unbroken, who knows how far you can pull them in from. And we're just talking one after the other here. Try ten every click, a hundred, a thousand.

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They started piling up, forming this artificial palisade at the first range

marker, this ridge of corpses that got higher and higher each minute. We were actually building an undead fortification, creating a situation where

all we had to do was pop every head that popped over the top. The brass

had planned for this. They had a periscope tower thing/ that let officers

see right over the wall. They also had real-time downlinks from satellites

and recon drones, although we, the grunts, had no idea what they were

seeing. Land Warrior was gone for now so all we had to do was concentrate

on what was in front of our faces.

We started getting contacts from all sides, either coming around the

wall or else being drawn in from our flanks and even rear. Again, the brass

was waiting for this and ordered us to form an RS.

A Reinforced Square.

Or a "Raj-Singh," I guess after the guy who reinvented it. We formed a

tight square, still two ranks, with our vehicles and whatnot in the center.

That was a dangerous gamble, cutting us off like that. I mean, yeah, it didn't

work that first time in India only 'cause the ammo ran out. But there was

no guarantee it wouldn't happen again to us. What if the brass had goofed,

hadn't packed enough rounds or underestimated how strong Zack would be

that day? It could have been Yonkers all over again; worse, because no one

would be getting out of there alive.

But you did have enough ammunition.

More than enough. The vehicles were packed to their roofs. We had water,

we had replacements. If you needed a fiver, you just raised your weapon

and one of the Sandlers would jump in and take our place on the firing

line. You'd grab a bite ofl-Rations, 8 soak your face, stretch, drain the weasel.

. h

9

No one would ever volunteer for a fiver, but they had t ese KO teams,

7. M43 Combat Observation Aid.

8. I-Rations: short for Intelligent Rations, they were designed for maximum nutritional

efficiency.

9. KO: short for "Knock Out."

WORLD WAR z 281

combat shrinks who were observing everyone's performance. They'd been with us since our early days on the range, knew us each by name and face, and knew, don't ask me how, when the stress of battle was starting to de­ grade our performance. We didn't know, I certainly didn't. There were a couple times I'd miss a shot or maybe take a half second instead of a full. Then suddenly I'd get this tap on my shoulder and I knew I was out of it for five. It really worked. Before I knew it, I was back on the line, bladder empty, stomach quiet, a few less kinks and muscle cramps. It made a world of difference, and anyone who thinks we could have lasted without it should try hitting a moving bull's-eye every second for fifteen hoµrs.

What about at night?

We used searchlights from the vehicles, powerful, red-coated beams so it didn't mess with your night vision. The only creepy thing about night fighting, other than the redness from the lights, is the glow a round makes when it enters the head. That's why we called them "Cherry PIES," be­ cause if the bullet's chemcomp wasn't mixed right, it would bum so bright it made their eyes glow red. That was a cure for constipation, especially later on, on nights when you pulled guard duty, and one would come at you out of the dark. Those glowing red eyes, frozen in time the second before it falls. !Shivers.I

How did you know the battle was over?

When we stopped shooting? !Laughs.I No, that's actually a good question. Around, i don't know, 0400, it started to taper off. Heads weren't poking out as much. The moan was dying down. The officers didn't tell us that the attack was almost over, but you could see them looking through their scopes, talking on their radios. You could see the relief in their faces. I think the last shot was fired just before dawn. After that, we just waited for first light.

It was kinda eerie, the sun rising over this mountainous ring of corpses. We were totally walled in, all sides were piled at least twenty feet high and

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over a hundred feet deep. I'm not sure how many we killed that day, stats

always vary depending on who you get it from.

The dozer-blade Humvees had to push a path through the corpse ring

just to let us get out. There were still living Gs, some slow ones who were

late to the party or who had tried to climb up and over their dead friends

and had slid back down into the mound. When we started burying the

bodies they came tumbling out. That was the only time Sefior Lobo saw

any action.

At least we didn't have to stick around for BS duty. They had another

unit waiting in reserve to clean up. I guess the brass figured we'd done

enough for one day. We marched ten miles to the east, set up a bivouac

with watchtowers and concertainer 10

walls. I was so damn beat. I don't re-.

member the chem shower, turning in my gear to be disinfected, turning in

my weapon for inspection: not one jam, not the whole unit. I don't even

remember slipping into my bag.

They let us sleep as late as we wanted the next day. That was pretty

sweet. Eventually the voices woke me up; everyone jawing, laughing ,

telling stories. It was a different vibe, one-eighty from two days ago. I

couldn't really put a finger on what I was feeling, maybe it was what the

president said about "reclaiming our future." I just knew I felt good, bette r

than I had the entire war. I knew it was gonna be a real, long-ass road. l

knew our campaign across America was just beginning, but, hey, as th e

prez said later that first night, it was finally the beginning of the end.

AINSWORTH, NEBRASKA, USA

!Darnell Hackworth is a shy, soft-spoken man. He and his wife

run a retirement farm for the four-legged yeterans of the army's

10.Concertainer: A prefabricated, hollow barrier constructed of Kev lar and filled with earth

and/or debris.

WORLD WAR Z 283

K-9 Corps. Ten years ago farms like these could be found in al­

most every state in the union. Now, this is the only one left.I

They never get enough credit, I think. There is that story Dax, nice

little children's book, but it's pretty simplistic, and it's only about one Dal­

matian that helped an orphan kid find his way to safety. "Dax" wasn't even

in the military, and helping lost children was a tiny fraction of dogs' over­

all contribution to the fight.

The first thing they used dogs for was triage, letting them sniff for who

was infected. Most countries were just copying the Israeli method of send­

ing people past dogs in cages. You always had to keep them in cages, other­

wise they might attack the person, or each other, or even their handler.

There was a lot of that, early in the war, dogs just going ballistic. It didn't

matter if they were police or military. It's that instinct, that involuntary, al­

most genetic terror. Fight or flight, and those dogs were bred to fight. A lot

of handlers lost hands, arms, a lot of throats got torn out. Can't blame the

dogs for it. In fact, that instinct was what the Israelis were counting on,

and it probably saved millions of lives.

It was a great program, but, again, just a fraction of what dogs were truly

capable of. Whereas the Israelis and, after them, a lot of other countries

only tried to exploit that terror instinct, we thought we could integrate it

into their regular training. And why not, we learned to do it for ourselves '

and are we really that much more evolved?

It all came down to training. You had to start young; even the most dis­

ciplined, prewar veterans were hardwired berserkers. The pups born after

the crisis came out of the womb literally smelling the dead. It was in the

air, not enough for us to detect, but just a few molecules, an introduction

on a subconscious level. That's not to say it made all of them automatic

warriors. The initial induction was the first and most important phase. You

took a group of pups, a random group, or even a whole litter, put them in a

room divided by a wire mesh. They're on one side, Zack's on the other. You

didn't have to wait long for a reaction. The first group we called Bs. They'd

start whimpering or howling. They'd lost it. They were nothing like the

As. Those pups would lock eyes with Zack, that was the key. They'd stand

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their ground, bare their teeth, and let out this low growl that said, "Back the fuck off!" They could control themselves, and that was the foundation of our program.

Now, just because they could control themselves didn't mean that we

could control them. Basic training was pretty much like the standard, pre­

war program. Could they handle PT? 1 Could they follow orders? Did they

have the intelligence, and the discipline, to make soldiers? It was hard

going, and we had a 60 percent washout rate. It wasn't uncommon for a re­

cruit to be badly injured, perhaps even killed. A lot of people nowadays

call that inhumane, though they don't seem to have the same sympathy for

the handlers. Yeah, we had to do it, too, right alongside the dogs, right

from day one of Basic, through ten more weeks of AIT. 2

lt was hard train­

ing, especially the Live Enemy Exercises. You know we were the first ones

to use Zack in our field training, before the infantry, before the Special

Forces, even before the Zoomies at Willow Creek? It was the only way to

really know if you could hack it, both as an individual and as a team.

How else could you have sent them on so many different missions?

There were Lures, the kind that the Battle of Hope made famous. Pretty

simple stuff; your partner hunts for Zack, then leads him into our firing

line. Ks on early missions used to be fast, run in, bark, then jam it for the

kill zone. Later, they got more comfortable. They learned to stay just a few

feet ahead, backing away slowly, making sure they herded the maximum ·

amount of targets. In that way, they actually called the shots.

There were also Decoys. Let's say you were setting up a firing line but

you didn't want Zack to show up too early. Your partner would circle

around the infested zone and only start barking on the far side. That

worked with a lot of engagements, and it opened the door for the "Lem­

ming" tactic. During the Denver push, there was a tall building where a couple hun­

dred refugees had accidentally been locked in with the infection and were

now completely reanimated. Before our guys could storm the entrance, one

1. PT: Physical Training.

2. A!T: Advanced Individual Training.

WORLD WAR z 285

of the Ks had his own idea to run up to the roof of a building across the street and start barking to draw Zack up onto the higher floors. It worked like a dream. The Gs made it up to the roof, saw their prey, made for him, and went spilling over the side. After Denver, Lemming went right into the playbook. Even the infantry started using it when Ks weren't available. It wasn't uncommon to see a grunt standing on the roof of a building, call­ ing out to an infested building close by.

But the primary and most common mission of any K team was scouting, both SC and LRP. SC is Sweep and Clear, just attached to a regular unit, like conventional warfare. That's where training really paid off. Not only could they sniff Zack out miles before us, but the sounds they �ade always told you exactly what to expect. You could tell everything you needed to know by the pitch of the growl, and the frequency of the bark. Sometimes, when silence was required, body language worked just as well. The arch of the K's back, the raising of dander was all you needed to see. After a few missions, any competent handler, and we had no other kind, could read his partner's every signal. Scouts finding a ghoul half submerged in mud or leg­ less among tall grass saved a lot of lives. I can't tell you how many times a grunt would thank us personally for spotting a concealed G that might have taken his foot off.

LRP was Long Range Patrol, when your partner would scout far beyond your lines, sometimes even traveling for days, to recon an infested area. They wore a special harness with a video uplink and OPS tracker that gave you real-time intel on the exact number and position of your targets. You could overlay Zack's position on a preexisting map, coordinating what your partner saw with his position on the OPS. I guess, from a technical side, it was pretty amazing, real-time hard intel like we used to have before the war. The brass loved it. I didn't; I was always too concerned with my part­ ner. I can't tell you how stressful that was, to be standing in some computer­ filled, air-conditioned room-safe, comfortable, and totally helpless. Later harness models had radio uplinks, so a handler could relay orders or, at least, abort the mission. I never worked with them. Teams had to be trained on those from the beginning. You couldn't go back and retrain a seasoned K. You couldn't teach an old dog new tricks. Sorry, bad joke. I heard a lot

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of those from the intel pukes; standing behind them as they watched the

damn monitor, mentally stroking it to the wonders of their new "Data Ori­

entation Asset." They thought they were so witty. Real fun for us to have DOA as an acronym.

!He shakes his head.I

I just had to stand there, thumb up my ass, watching my partner's POV

as she crept through some forest, or marsh, or town. Towns and cities, that

was the hardest. That was my team's specialty. Hound Town. You ever

heard of that?

The K-9 Uxban Wax/axe School?

That's it, a real town: Mitchell, Oregon. Sealed off, abandoned, and still

filled with active Gs. Hound Town. It actually should have been called

Terrytown, because most of the breeds at Mitchell were small terriers. Little

cairns and Norwiches and JRs, good for rubble and narrow choke points.

Personally, the hound in Hound Town suited me just fine. I worked with a

dachle. They were, by far, the ultimate urban war fighters. Tough, smart,

and, especially the minis, completely at home in confined spaces. In fact,

that's what they were originally bred for; "badger dog," that's what dachs­

hund means in German. That's why they had that hot dog look, so they

could hunt in low, narrow badger burrows. You see how that kind of breed­

ing already made them suited to the ducts and crawl spaces of an urban

battleground. The ability to go through a pipe, an airshaft, in between

walls, whatever, without losing their cool, was a major survival asset.

[We are interrupted. As if on cue, a dog limps over to Darnell's

side. She is old. Her muzzle is white, the fur on her ears and tail

is worn to leather.I

!To the dog.I Hey, little miss.

WORLD WAR z 287

IDarnell gingerly lifts her to his lap. She is small, no more than

eight or nine pounds. Although she bears some resemblance to a

smooth-haired, miniature dachshund, her back is shorter than

the standard breed.I

!To the dog.I You doin' okay, Maze? You feel all right? [To me.I Her full name's Maisey, but we never used it. "Maze" was pretty fitting, don't you think?

[With one hand he massages her back legs while with the other

he rubs under her neck. She looks up at him with milky eyes. She

licks his palm.I

Pure bloods were a total washout. Too neurotic, too many health prob­ lems, everything you'd expect from breeding an animal for just its aesthetic qualities. The new generation lhe gestures to the mutt on his lap! was al­ ways a mix, whatever would increase both physical constitution and men­ tal stability.

[The dog has gone to sleep. Darnell lowers his voice.I

They were tough, took a lot of training, not just individually but for working in groups on LRP missions. Long range, especially over wild terrain, was always risky. Not just from Zack, but also from feral Ks. Remember how bad they were? All those pets and strays that degenerated into killer packs. They were always a concern, usually in transition through low-infestation zones, always looking for something to eat. A lot of LRP missions were aborted in the beginning before we deployed escort dogs.

!He refers to the sleeping dog.I

She had two escorts. Pongo, who was a pit-rot mix, and Perdy . .. I don't really know what Perdy was, part shepherd, part stegosaurus. I wouldn't

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have let her anywhere near them if I hadn't gone through basic with their handlers. They turned out to be first-rate escorts. Fourteen times they chased off feral packs, twice they really got into it. I watched Ferdy go after this two-hundred-pound mastiff, grab its skull in her jaws, you could actu­ ally hear the crack over the harness's surveillance mic.

The toughest part for me was making sure Maze stuck to the mission. She always wanted to fight. !Smiles down at the s leeping dachshund.] They were good escorts, always made sure she got to her target objective, waited for her, and always got her home safely. You know they even took down a few Gs in transit.

But isn't Z flesh toxic?

Oh yeah ... no, no, no, they never bit. That would have been fatal. You'd see a lot of dead Ks in the beginning of the war, just lying there, no wounds, and you knew they'd bitten infected flesh. That's one of the rea­ sons training was so important. They had to know how to defend them­ selves. Zack's got a lot of physical advantages, but balance isn't one of them. The bigger Ks could always hit between the shoulder blades or the small of the back, just knock them on their faces. The minis had the option of trip­ ping, getting underfoot, or launching themselves at the knee-pit. Maze al­ ways preferred that, dropped 'em right on their backs!

!The dog stirs.I

!To Maze.] Oh, sorry, little miss. !Strokes the back of her neck.I !To me.J By the time Zack got back up, you'd bought yourself five, maybe

ten, fifteen seconds.

We had our share of casualties. Some Ks would have a fall, break a bone ... If they were close to friendly forces, their handler could pick them up pretty easily, get them to safety. Most of the time they even re­ turned to active duty.

WORLD WAR Z 289

What about the other times?

If they were too far, a Lure or an LRP ... too far for rescue and too close to

Zack ... we petitioned for Mercy Charges, little explosive packs strapped

to the harness so we could detonate them if it looked like there wasn't any

chance of rescue. We never got them. "A waste of valuable resources."

Cocksuckers. Putting a wounded soldier out of his misery was a waste but

turning them into Fragmuts, now, that they'd consider!

Excuse me?

"Fragmuts." That was the unofficial name for the program that almost, al­

most got the green light. Some staff asshole'd read that the Russians had

used "mine dogs " during World War II, strapped explosives to their backs

and trained them to run under Nazi tanks. The only reason Ivan ended his

program was the same reason we never began ours: the situation was no

longer desperate enough. How fucking desperate do you have to be?

They'll never say it, but I think what stopped them was the threat of an­

other Eckhart incident. That really woke 'em up. You know about that,

right? Sergeant Eckhart, God bless her. She was a senior handler, operated

up with AGN. 3

I never met her. Her partner was pulling a Lure mission

outside Little Rock, fell in a ditch, broke his leg. The swarm was only a few

steps away. Eckhart grabbed a rifle, tried to go out after him. Some officer

got in her face, started spouting regs and half-assed justifications. She emp­

tied half a clip in his mouth. MPs tackled. her ass, held her on the ground.

She could hear everything as the dead surrounded her partner.

What happened?

They hung her, public execution, real high profile. I understand, no, I really

do. Discipline was everything, rule of law, that's all we had. But you better

3. AON: Army Group North.

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fucking believe there were some changes. Handlers were allowed to go after

their partners, even if it meant risking their own lives. We weren't consid­

ered assets anymore, we were half-assets. For the first time the army saw us as

teams, that a dog wasn't just a piece of machinery you could replace when

"broken." They started looking at statistics of handlers who offed themselves

after losing a partner. You know we had the highest rate of suicide among

any branch of the service. More than Special Forces, more than Graves

Registration, even more than those sick fucks at China Lake. 4

At Hound

Town I met handlers from thirteen other countries. They all said the same

thing. It didn't matter where you were from, what your culture or back­

ground, the feelings were still the same. Who could suffer that kind of loss

and come out in one piece? Anyone who could wouldn't have made a han­

dler in the first place. That's what made us our own breed, that ability to bond

so strongly with something that's not even our own species. The very thing

that made so many of my friends take the bullet's way out was what made

us one of the most successful outfits in the whole fucking U.S. military.

The army saw it in me that day on a stretch of deserted road somewhere

in the Colorado Rockies. I'd been on foot since escaping my apartment in

Atlanta, three months of running, hiding, scavenging. I had rickets, fever,

I was down to ninety-six pounds. I found these two guys under a tree. They

were making a fire. Behind them was this little mutt. His paws and snout

were bound with shoelaces. Dried blood was caked on his face. He was just

lying there, glassy-eyed, whimpering softly.

What happened?

You know, I honestly don't remember. I must have hit one of them with my

bat. They found it cracked over his shoulder. They found me on the other

guy, just pounding his face in. Ninety-six pounds, half dead myself, and I

beat this guy to within an inch of his life. The Guardsmen had to pull me

off, cuff me to a car hulk, smack me a couple times to get me to refocus.

That, I remember. One of the guys I attacked was holding his arm, the

4. China Lake weapons research facility.

WORLD WAR Z 291

other one was just lying there bleeding. "Calm the fuck down," the LT

said, trying to question me, "What's wrong with you? Why'd you do that to

your friends?" "He's not our friend!" the one with the broken arm yelled,

"he's fuckin' crazy!" And all I kept saying was "Don't hurt the dog! Don't

hurt the dog!" I remember the Guardsmen just laughed. "Jesus Christ," one

of them said looking down at the two guys. The LT nodded, then looked at

me. "Buddy," he said, "I think we got a job for you." And that's how I got

recruited. Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.

[Darnell pets Maze. She cracks one eyelid. Her leathery tail wags.I

What happened to the dog?

I wish I could give you a Disney ending, like he became my partner or

ended up saving a whole orphanage from a fire or something. They'd hit

him with a rock to knock him out. Fluid built up in his ear canals. He lost

all hearing in one and partial hearing in the other. But his nose still

worked and he did make a pretty good ratter once I found him a home. He

hunted enough vermin to keep that family fed all winter. That's kind of a

Disney ending, I guess, Disney with Mickey stew. [Laughs softly.I You

wanna know something crazy? I used to hate dogs.

Really?

Despised them; dirty, smelly, slobbering germ bags that humped your leg

and made the carpet smell like piss. God, I hated them. I was that guy

who'd come over to your house and refuse to pet the dog. I was the guy at

work who always made fun of people with dog pictures on their desk. You

know that guy who'd always threaten to call Animal Control when your

pooch barked at night?

[Motions to himself.I

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I lived a block away from a pet store. I used to drive by it every day on my way to work, confounded by how these sentimental, socially incompe- - , tent losers could shell out so much money on oversized, barking hamsters. During the Panic, the dead started to collect around that pet shop. I don't know where the owner was. He'd pulled down the gates but left the ani­ mals inside. I could hear them from my bedroom window. All day, all night. Just puppies, you know, a couple of weeks old. Scared little babies screaming for their mommies, for anyone, to please come and save them.

I heard them die, one by one as their water bottles ran out. The dead never got in. They were still massed outside the gate when I escaped, ran right past without stopping to look. What could I have done? I was un­ armed, untrained. I couldn't have taken care of them. I could barely take care of myself. What could I have done? .. . Something.

!Maze sighs in her sleep. Darnell pats her gently.I

I could have done something.

SIBERIA, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE

!The people who exist in this shantytown do so under th e most

primitive conditions. There is no electricity, no running water.

The huts are grouped together behind a wall cut from th e sur­

rounding trees. The smallest hovel belongs to Father Sergei

Ryzhkov. It is a miracle to see how the old cleric is still a ble to

function. His walk reveals the numerous wartime and postw ar in­

juries. The handshake reveals that all his fingers have been b roken.

His attempt at a smile reveals that those teeth not black with

decay have been knocked out a long time ago.I

WORLD WAR z 2 93

In order to understand how we became a "religiou s state," and how that

state began with a man like me, you have to un derstand the nature of our

war against the undead. As with so many other conflicts, our greatest

ally was General Winter.

The biting cold, lengthened and strengthene d by the planet's darkened

skies, gave us the time we needed to prepare o ur homeland for liberation.

Unlike the United States, we were fighting a war on two fronts. We had

the Ural barrier in the west, and the Asian swarms from the southeast.

Siberia had been stabilized, finally, but was by no means completely secure.

We had so many refugees from India and C hina, so many frozen ghouls

that thawed, and continue to thaw, each spri ng. We needed those winter

months to reorganize our forces, marshal our population, inventory and

distribute our vast stocks of military hardware .

We didn't have the war production of other countries. There was no

Department of Strategic Resources in Russia: no industry other than find­

ing enough food to keep our people alive. W hat we did have was our

legacy of a military industrial state. I know y ou in the West have always

laughed at us for this "folly." "Paranoid lvan"- that's what you called us­

"building tanks and guns while his people cry out for cars and butter." Yes,

the Soviet Union was backward and inefficie nt and yes, it did bankrupt

our economy on mountains of military might , but when the motherland

needed them, those mountains were what save d her children.

[He refers to the faded poster on the wall behind him. It sh

ows

the ghostly image of an old S oviet soldier reaching down f

rom

heaven to hand a crude sub machine gun to a grateful y

oung

R<ussian. The caption underne ath reads "Dyedooshka, Spaci

ba"

!Thank you, Grandfather!.]

I was a chaplain with the Thirty-second Moto r Rifle division. We were

a Category D unit; fourth-class equipment, th e oldest in our arsenal. We

looked like extras in an old Great Patriotic W ar movie with our PPSH

submachine guns and our bolt-action Mosin-N agant rifles. We didn't have

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your fancy, new battle dress uniform. We wore the tunics of our grand­ fathers: rough, moldy, moth-eaten wool that could barely keep the cold out, and did nothing to protect against bites.

We had a very high casualty rate, most of it in urban combat, and most of that due to faulty ammunition. Those rounds were older than us; some of them had been sitting in crates, open to the elements, since before Stalin breathed his last. You never knew when a "Cugov" would happen, when your weapon would "click" at the moment a ghoul was upon you. That happened a lot in the Thirty-second Motor Rifle division.

We weren't as neat and organized as your army. We didn't have your tight, light little Raj-Singh squares or your frugal "one shot, one kill" combat doc­ trine. Our battles were sloppy and brutal. We plastered the enemy in DShK heavy machine-gun fire, drowned them with flamethrowers and Katyusha rockets, and crushed them under the treads of our prehistoric T-34 tanks. It was inefficient and wasteful and resulted in too many needless deaths.

Ufa was the first major battle of our offensive. It became the reason we stopped going into the cities and started walling them up during winter. We learned a lot of lessons those first months, charging headlong into the rubble after hours of merciless artillery, fighting block by block, house by house, room by room. There were always too many zombies, too many mis­ fires, and always too many bitten boys.

We didn't have L pills 1

like in your army. The only way to deal with in­ fection was a bullet. But who was going to pull the trigger? Certainly not the other soldiers. To kill your comrade, even in cases as merciful as infec­ tion, was too reminiscent of the decimations. That was the irony of it all. The decimations had given our armed forces the strength and discipline to do anything we asked of them, anything but that. To ask, or even order, one soldier to kill another was crossing a line that might have sparked an­ other mutiny.

For a while the responsibility rested with the leadership, the officers and

1. L (Lethal) pill: A term to describe any poison capsule and one of the options available to infected U.S. military combatants during World War z.

WORLD WAR Z 295

senior sergeants. We couldn't have made a more damaging decision. To

have to look into the faces of these men, these boys whom you were respon­

sible for, whom you fought with side by side, shared bread and blankets,

saved his life or have him save yours. W ho can focus on the monumental

burden of leadership after having to commit such an act?

We began to see a noticeable degradation among our field commanders.

Dereliction of duty, alcoholism, suicide-suicide became almost epidemic

among the officer corps. Our division lost four experienced leaders, three

junior lieutenants, and a major, all during the first week of our first cam­

paign. Two of the lieutenants shot themselves, one right after committing

the deed, and the other later that night. The third platoon leader chose a

more passive method, what we began to call "suicide by combat." He vol­

unteered for increasingly dangerous missions, acting more like a reckless

enlisted man than a responsible leader. He died trying to take on a dozen

ghouls with nothing but a bayonet.

Major Kovpak just vanished. No one knows exactly when. We knew he

couldn't have been taken. The area was thoroughly swept and no one, ab­

solutely no one left the perimeter without an escort. We all knew what

probably happened. Colonel Savichev put out an official statement that

the major had been sent on a long-range recon mission and had never re­

turned. He even went so far as to recommend him for a first-class Order of

the Rodina. You can't stop the rumors, and nothing is worse for a unit's

morale than to know that one of their officers had deserted. I could not

blame the man, I still cannot. Kovpak was a good man, a strong leader. Be­

fore the crisis he had done three tours in Chechnya and one in Dagestan.

W hen the dead began to rise, he not only prevented his company from re­

volting, but led them all, on foot, carrying both supplies and wounded from

Curtain the Salib Mountains all the way to Manaskent on the Caspian

Sea. Sixty-five days, thirty-seven major engagements. Thirty-seven! He

could have become an instructor-he'd more than earned the right-and

had even been asked by STAVK A because of his extensive combat experi­

ence. But no, he volunteered for an immediate return to action. And now

he was a deserter. They used to call this "the Second Decimation," the fact

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that almost one in every ten officers killed themselves in those days, a dec­

imation that almost brought our war effort to a crushing halt.

The logical alternative, the only one, was to therefore let the boys com­

mit the act themselves. I can still remember their faces, dirty and pimply,

their red-rimmed eyes wide as they closed their mouths around their rifles. What else could be done? It wasn't long before they began to kill them­ selves in groups, all those who'd been bitten in a battle gathering at the

field hospital to synchronize the moment when they would all pull the

trigger. I guess it was comforting, knowing that they weren't dying alone. It

was probably the only comfort they could expect. They certainly didn't get

it from me.

I was a religious man in a country that had long since lost its faith.

Decades of communism followed by materialistic democracy had left this

generation of Russians with little knowledge of, or need for, "the opium of

the masses." As a chaplain, my duties were mainly to collect letters from

the condemned boys to their families, and to distribute any vodka I man­

aged to find. It was a next-to-useless existence, I knew, and the way our

country was headed, I doubted anything would occur to change that.

It was right after the battle for Kostroma, just a few weeks before the of­

ficial assault on Moscow. I had come to the field hospital to give last rights

to the infected. They had been set apart, some badly mauled, some still

healthy and lucid. The first boy couldn't have been older than seventeen.

He wasn't bitten, that would have been merciful. The zombie had had its

forearms ripped off by the treads of an SU-152 self-propelled gun. All that

remained was hanging flesh and broken humerus bones, jagged at the

edges, sharp like spears. They stabbed right through the boy's tunic where

whole hands would have just grabbed him. He was lying on a cot, bleeding

from his belly, ashen-faced, rifle quivering in his hand. Next to him was a

row of five other infected soldiers. I went through the motions of telling

them I would pray for their souls. They either shrugged or nodded politely.

I took their letters, as I'd always done, gave them a drink, and even passed

out a couple cigarettes from their commanding" officer. Even though I'd

done this many times, somehow I felt strangely different. Something was

stirring within me, a tense, tingling sensation that began to work its way

WORLD WAR 2 297

up through my heart and lungs. I began to feel my whole body tremble as

the soldiers all placed the muzzles of their weapons underneath their chins.

"On three," the oldest of them said. "One . . . two ... " That was as far as

they got. The seventeen-year-old flew backward and hit the ground. The

others stared dumbfounded at the bullet hole in his forehead, then up to

the smoking pistol in my hand, in God's hand.

God was speaking to me, I could feel his words ringing in my head. "No

more sinning," he told me, "no more souls resigned to hell." It was so clear,

so simple. Officers killing soldiers had cost us too many good officers, and

soldiers killing themselves had cost the Lord too many good souls. Suicide

was a sin, and we, his servants-those who had chosen to be.his shepherds

upon the earth-were the only ones who should bear the cross of releasing

trapped souls from infected bodies! That is what I told division com­

mander after he discovered what I'd done, and that is the message that

spread first to every chaplain in the field and then to every civilian priest

throughout Mother Russia.

What later became known as the act of "Final Purification" was only

the first step of a religious fervor that would surpass even the Iranian revo­

lution of the 1980s. God knew his children had been denied his love for

too long. They needed direction, courage, hope! You could say that it is

the reason we emerged from that war as a nation of faith, and have contin­

ued to rebuild our state, on the basis of that faith.

Is there any truth to the stories of that philosophy being perverted for

political reasons?

!Pause.I I don't understand.

The president declared himself head of the Church ...

Can't a national leader feel God's love?

But what about organizing priests into "death squads," and assassinating

people under the premise of "purifying infected victims"?

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!Pause.I I don't know what you're talking about.

Isn't that why you eventually fell out with Moscow? Isn't that why you're here?

!There is a long pause. We hear the sounds of footsteps ap­

proaching. Someone knocks at the door. Father Sergei opens it

to find a small, ragged child. Mud stains his pale, frightened

face. He speaks in a frantic, local dialect, shouting and pointing

up the road. The old priest nods solemnly, pats the boy on the

shoulder, then turns to me.I

Thank you for coming. Will you excuse me, please?

!As I rise to leave, he opens a large wooden chest at the foot of

his bed, removing both a bible and a World War II-era pistol.I

ABOARD USS HoLO KAt,

OFF THE COAST OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

IDeep Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a

minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out

through a thick, transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief

Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me from the port hull. Choi

is one of the "old-timers," possibly the most experienced diver

in the U.S. Navy's Deep Submergence Combat Corps IDSCCI. His

gray temples and weathered crow's-feet clash violently with his

almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the mother ship lowers us into

the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of "surfer dude" bleeding

through Choi 's otherwise neutral accent.I

WORLD WAR 2 299

My war never ended. If anything, you could say it's still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human as­ sets. They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen's nets. You can't work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable with­

out running into a swarm. That's what this dive is about: trying to find

them, track them, and predict their movements so maybe we can have

some advance warning.

[We hit the whitecaps with a janing thud. Choi grins, checks his

instruments, and shifts the channels on his radio from me to the

mother ship. The water before my observation dome froths white

for a second, then gives way to light blue as we submerge.I

You're not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are

you, because that crap's got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and

bang sticks and zombie river nets ... I can't help you with any of that. If

you want civilians, talk to civilians.

But the military did use those methods.

Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes. Person­

ally, I've never worn a mesh suit or a scuba rig ... well ... at least not in

combat. My war was strictly ADS. Atmospheric Diving Suit. Kind of like a

space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one. The technology actually

goes back a couple hundred years, when some gu/ invented a barrel with

a faceplate and arm holes. After that you had stuff like the Tritonia and the

Neufeldt-Kuhnke. They looked like something out of an old 1950s sci-fi

movie, "Robby the Robot" and shit. It all kinda fell by the wayside

when ... do you really care about all this?

Yes, please • . •

1. John Lethbridge, circa 1715.

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Well, that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented.

It only made a comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on

offshore oil rigs. You see ... the deeper you go, the greater the pressure; the

greater the pressure, the more dangerous it is for scuba or similar mixed-gas

rigs. You've got to spend days, sometimes weeks, in a decompression cham­

ber, and if, for some reason, you have to shoot up to the surface ... you get

the bends, gas bubbles in the blood, in the brain ... and we're not even

talking about long-term health hazards like bone necrosis, soaking your

body with shit nature never intended to be there.

!He pauses to check his instruments.I

The safest way to dive, to go deeper, to stay down longer, was to enclose

your whole body in a bubble of surface pressure.

!He gestures to the compartments around us.I

Just like we are now-safe, protected, still on the surface as far as our

bodies' concerned. That's what an ADS does, its depth and duration only I

limited by armor and life support.

So it's like a personal submarine?

"Submersible." A submarine can stay down for years, maintaining its own

power, making its own air. A submersible can only make short duration

dives, like World War II subs or what we're in now.

!The water begins to darken, deepening to a. purplish ink.I

The very nature of an ADS, the fact that it'� really just a suit of armor,

makes it ideal for blue and black water combat. I'm not knocking soft suits,

you know, shark or other mesh rigs. They've got ten times the maneuver-

WORLD WAR z 301

ability, the speed, the agility, but they're strictly shallow water at best, and

if for some reason a couple of those fuckers get ahold of you ... I've seen

mesh divers with broken arms, broken ribs, three with broken necks.

Drowning ... if your air line was punctured or the regulator's ripped out of

your mouth. Even in a hard helmet on a mesh-lined dry suit, all they'd

have to do is hold you down, let your air run out. I've seen too many guys

go out that way, or else try to race for the surface and let an embolism fin­

ish what Zack started.

Did that happen a lot to mesh suit divers?

Sometimes, especially in the beginning, but it never happened to us. There

was no risk of physical danger. Both your body and your life support are en­

cased in a cast-aluminum or high-strength composite shell. Most models'

joints are steel or titanium. No matter which way Zack turned your arms,

even if he managed to get a solid grip, which is hard considering how

smooth and round everything is, it was physically impossible to break off a

limb. If for some reason you need to jet up to the surface, just jettison your

ballast or your thruster pack, if you had one ... all suits are positively

buoyant. They pop right up like a cork. The only risk might be if Zack were

clinging to you during the ascent. A couple times I've had buddies sur­

face with uninvited passengers hanging on for dear life ... or undeath.

!Chuckles.I

Balloon ascents almost never happened in combat. Most ADS models

have forty-eight hours emergency life support. No matter how many Gs

dog-piled you, no matter if a hunk of debris came crumbling down or your

leg got snagged in an underwater cable, you could sit tight, snug and safe,

and just wait for the cavalry. No one ever dives alone, and I think the

longest any ADS diver has ever had to cool his heels was six hours. There

were times, more than I can count on my fingers, where one of us would

get snagged, report it, then follow up by saying that there was no immedi­

ate danger, and that the rest of the team should assist only after accom­

plishing their mission.

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You say ADS models. Was there more than one type?

We had a bunch: civilian, military, old, new ... well ... relatively new. We couldn't build any wartime models, so we had to work with what was al­ ready available. Some of the older ones dated back to the seventies, the JIMs and SAMs. I'm really glad I never had to operate any of those. They only had universal joints and portholes instead of a face bowl, at least on the early JIMs. I knew one guy, from the British Special Boat Service. He had these mondo blood blisters all along his inner thighs from where the JIM's leg joints pinched his skin. Kick-ass divers, the SBS, but I'd never swap jobs with them.

We had three basic U.S. Navy models: the Hardsuit 1200, the 2000, and the Mark 1 Exosuit . That was my baby, the exo. You wanna talk about sci-fi, this thing looked like it was made to fight giant space termites. It was much slimmer than either of the two hardsuits, and light enough that you could even swim. That was the major advantage over the hardsuit, actually over all other ADS systems. To be able to operate above your enemy, even without a power sled or thruster packs, that more than made up for the fact that you couldn't scratch your itches. The hardsuits were big enough to allow your arms to be pulled into the central cavity to allow you to operate secondary equipment.

What kind of equipment?

Lights, video, side scanning sonar. The hardsuits were full-service units exos were the bargain basement. You didn't have to worry about a lot 0; readouts and machinery. You didn't have any of the distractions or the multitasking of the hardsuits. The exo was sleek and simple, allowing you to focus on your weapon and the field in front of you.

What kind of weapons did you use?

At first we had the M-9, kind of a cheap, modified, knockoff of the Russ­ ian APS. I say "modified" because no ADS had anything close to resem-

WORLD WAR Z 303

bling hands. You either had four-pronged claws or simple, industrial pin­

cers. Both worked as hand-to-hand weapons-just grab a G's head and

squeeze-but they made it impossible to fire a gun. The M-9 was fixed to

your forearm and could be fired electrically. It had a laser pointer for accu­

racy and air-encased cartridges that fired these four-inch-long steel rods.

The major problem was that they were basically designed for shallow water

operations. At the depth we needed, they imploded like eggshells. About a

year in we got a much more efficient model, the M-11, actually invented

by the same guy who invented both the hardsuit and exo. I hope that crazy

Canuck got an assload of medals for what he's done for us. The only prob­

lem with it was that DeStRes thought production was too expensive. They

kept telling us that between our claws and preexisting construction tools,

we had more than enough to handle Zack.

What changed their minds?

Troll. We were in the North Sea, repairing that Norwegian natural gas

platform, and suddenly there they were ... We'd expected some kind of

attack-the noise and light of the construction site always attracted at

least a handful of them. We didn't know a swarm was nearby. One of our

sentries sounded off, we headed for his beacon, and we were suddenly in­

undated. Horrible thing to fight hand-to-hand underwater. The bottom

churns up, your visibility is shot, like fighting inside a glass of milk. Zom­

bies don't just die when you hit them, most of the time they disintegrate,

fragments of muscle, organ, brain matter, mixed up with the silt and

swirling around you. Kids today ... fuckin' A, I sound like my pops, but it's

true, the kids today, the new ADS divers in the Mark 3s and 4s, they have

this "ZeVDeK"-Zero Visibility Detection Kit-with color-imaging sonar

and low-light optics. The picture is relayed through a heads-up display

right on your face bowl like a fighter plane. Throw in a pair of stereo hy­

drophones and you've got a real sensory advantage over Zack. That was not

the case when I first went exo. We couldn't see, we couldn't hear-we

couldn't even feel if a G was trying to grab us from behind.

Why was that?

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Because the one fundamental flaw of an ADS is complete tactile blackout.

The simple fact that the suit is hard means you can't feel anything from the

outside world, even if a G has his hands right on you. Unless Zack is ac­

tively tugging, trying to pull you back or flip you around, you may not

know he's there until his face is right up against yours. That night at

Troll ... our helmet lights only made the problem worse by throwing up a

glare that was only broken by an undead hand or face. That was the only

time I was ever spooked ... not scared, you understand, just spooked,

swinging in this liquid chalk and suddenly a rotting face is jammed against

my face bowl.

The civilian oil workers, they wouldn't go back to work, even under

threat of reprisals, until we, their escorts, were better armed. They'd lost

enough of their people already, ambushed out of the darkness. Can't imag­

ine what that must have been like. You're in this dry suit, working in near

pitch-black, eyes stinging from the light of the welding torch, body numb

from the cold or else burning from the hot water pumped through the sys­

tem. Suddenly you feel these hands, or teeth. You struggle, call for help, try

to fight or swim as they pull you up. Maybe a few body parts will rise to the

surface, maybe they'll just pull up a severed lifeline. That was how the

DSCC came into being as an official outfit. Our first mission was to pro­

tect the rig divers, keep the oil flowing. Later we expanded to beachhead

sanitation and harbor clearing.

What is beachhead sanitation?

Basically, helping the jarheads get ashore. What we learned during Bermuda,

our first amphibious landing, was that the beachhead was coming under

constant attack by Gs walking out of the surf. We had to establish a

perimeter, a semicircular net around the proposed landing area that was

deep enough for ships to pass over, but high enough to keep out Zack.

That's where we came in. Two weeks before the landings took place, a

WORLD WAR 2 305

ship would anchor several miles offshore and start banging away with their active sonar. That was to draw Zack away from the beach.

Wouldn't that sonar also lure in zombies from deeper water?

The brass told us that was an "acceptable risk." I think they didn't have anything better. That's why it was an ADS op, too risky for mesh divers. You knew that masses were gathering under that pinging ship, and that once they went silent, you'd be the brightest target out there. It actually turned out to be the closest thing we ever had to a cakewalk. The attack frequency was the lowest by far, and when the nets were up, they had an al­ most perfect success rate. All you needed was a skeleton force to keep a constant vigil, maybe snipe the occasional G that tried to climb the fence. They didn't really need us for this kind of op. After the first three landings, they went back to using mesh divers.

And harbor clearing?

That was not a cakewalk. That was in the final stages of the war, when it wasn't just about opening a beachhead, but reopening harbors for deep­ water shipping. That was a massive, combined operation: mesh divers, ADS units, even civilian volunteers with nothing but a scuba rig and a spear gun. I helped clear Charleston, Norfolk, Boston, freakin' Boston, and the mother of all subsurface nightmares, the Hero City. I know grunts like to bitch about fighting to clear a city, but imagine a city underwater, a city of sunken ships and cars and planes and every kind of debris imaginable. Dur­ ing the ev;cuation, when a lot of container ships were trying to make as much room as they could, a lot of them dumped their cargo overboard. Couches, toaster ovens, mountains and mountains of clothes. Plasma TVs always crunched when you walked over them. I always imagined it was bone. I also imagined I could see Zack behind each washer and dryer, climbing over each pile of smashed air conditioners. Sometimes it was just my imagination, but sometimes ... The worst ... the worst was having to

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clear a sunken ship. There were always a few that had gone down within the harbor boundaries. A couple, like the Frank Cabl.e, big sub tender turned refugee ship, had gone down right at the mouth of the harbor. Be­ fore she could be raised, we had to do a compartment-by-compartment sweep. That was the only time the exo ever felt bulky, unwieldy. I didn't smack my head in every passageway, but it sure as hell felt like it. A lot of the hatches were blocked by debris. We either had to cut our way through them, or through the decks and bulkheads. Sometimes the deck had been weakened by damage or corrosion. I was cutting through a bulkhead above the Cabl.e's engine room when suddenly the deck just collapsed under me. Before I could swim, before I could think ... there were hundreds of them in the engine room. I was engulfed, drowning in legs and arms and hunks of meat. If I ever had a recurring nightmare, and I'm not saying I do, because I don't, but if I did, I'd be right back in there, only this time I'm completely naked ... I mean I would be.

II am surprised at how quickly we reach the bottom. It looks like

a desert wasteland, glowing white against the permanent dark­

ness. I see the stumps of wire coral, broken and trampled by the

living dead.I

There they are.

II look up to see the swarm, roughly sixty of them, walking out of

the desert night.I

And here we go.

[Choi maneuvers us above them. They reach up for our search­

lights, eyes wide and jaws slack. I can see the dim red beam of

the laser as it settles on the first target. A se,cond later, a small

dart is fired into its chest.I

And one ...

WORLD WAR Z 307

[He centers his beam on a second subject.I

And two ...

[He moves down the swarm, tagging each one with a nonlethal

shot.I

Kills me not to kill them. I mean, I know the whole point is to study their movements, set up an early warning network. I know that if we had the resources to clear them all we would. Still ...

!He darts a sixth target. Like all the others, this one is oblivious

to the small hole in its sternum.I

How do they do it? How are they still around? Nothing in the world cor­ rodes like saltwater. These Gs should have gone way before the ones on land. Their clothes sure did, any thing organic like cloth or leather.

[The figures below us are practically naked.I

So why not the rest of them? Is it the temperature at these depths, is it the pressure? And why do they have such a resistance to pressure anyway? At this depth the human nervous system should be completely Jell-0-ized. They shouldn't even be able to stand, let alone walk and "think" or what­ ever their version of thinking is. How do they do it? I'm sure someone real high up has all the answers and I'm sure the only reason they don't tell me is ...

[He is suddenly distracted by a flashing light on his instrument

panel.I

Hey, hey, hey. Check this out.

II look down at my own panel. The readouts are incomprehensible.I

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We got a hot one, pretty healthy rad count. Must be from the Indian

Ocean, Iranian or Paki, or maybe that ChiCom attack boat that went

down off Manihi. How about that?

[He fires another dart.I

You're lucky. This is one of the last manned recon dives. Next month

it's all ROY, 100 percent Remotely Operated Vehicles.

There's been a lot of controversy ov�r the use of ROVs for combat.

Never happen. The Sturge's 2

got way too much star power. She'd never let

Congress go 'droid on us.

Is there any validity to their argument?

What, you mean if robots are more efficient fighters than ADS divers?

Hell no. All that talk about "limiting human casualties" is bullshit. We

never lost a man in combat, not one! That guy they keep talking about,

Chemov, he was killed after the war, on land, when he got wasted and

passed out on a tram line. Fuckin' politicians.

Maybe ROVs are more cost-effective, but one thing they're not is better.

I'm not just talking about artificial intelligence; I'm talking heart, instinct,

initiative, everything that makes us us. That's why I'm still here, same with

the Sturge, and almost all the other vets who took the plunge during the

war. Most of us are still involved because we have to be, because they still

haven't yet come up with a collection of chips and bits to replace us. Be­

lieve me, once they do, I'll not only never look at an exosuit again, I'll quit

the navy and pull a full-on Alpha November Alpha.

2. "The Sturgeon General": The old civilian nickname for. the present commander of the

DSCC.

WORLD WAR z 309

What's that?

Action in the North Atlantic, this old, black-and-white war flick. There's a · guy in it, you know the "Skipper" from Gilligan's Islarul, his old man.

3 He

had a line . .. "I'm putting an oar on my shoulder and I'm starting inland. And the first time a guy says to me 'What's that on your shoulder?' that's where I'm settling for the rest of my life."

QUEBEC, CANADA

!The small farmhouse has no wall, no bars on the windows, and

no lock on the door. When I ask the owner about his vulnerabil­

ity he simply chuckles and resumes his lunch. Andre Renard,

brother of the legendary war hero Emil Renard, has requested

that I keep his exact location secret. "I don't care if the dead find me," he says without feeling, "but I care very little for the

living." The former French national immigrated to this place

after the official end of hostilities in western Europe. Despite

numerous invitations from the French government, he has not

returned.I

Everyone else is a liar, everyone who claims that their campaign was "the hardest of the entire war." All those ignorant peacocks who beat their chests and brag about "mountain warfare" or "jungle warfare" or "urban warfare." Cities, oh how they love to brag about cities! "Nothing more ter­ rifying than fighting in a city!" Oh really? Try underneath one.

3. Alan Hale, Senior.

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Do you know why the Paris skyline was devoid of skyscrapers, I

mean the prewar, proper Paris skyline? Do you know why they stuck all

those glass and steel monstrosities out in La Defense, so far from the city

center? Yes, there's aesthetics, a sense of continuity and civic pride ...

not like that architectural mongrel called London. But the truth, the

logical, practical, reason for keeping Paris free from American-style mono­

liths is that the earth beneath their feet is simply too tunneled to sup- ,

port it.

There are Roman tombs, quarries that supplied limestone for much of

the city, even World War II bunkers used by the Resistance and yes, there

was a Resistance! Then there is the modem Metro, the telephone lines,

the gas mains, the water pipes ... and through it all, you have the cata­

combs. Roughly six million bodies were buried there, taken from the pre­

revolution cemeteries, where corpses were just tossed in like rubbish. The

catacombs contained entire walls of skulls and bones arranged in macabre

patterns. It was even functional in places where interlocking bones held

back mounds of loose remains behind them. The skulls always seemed to

be laughing at me.

I don't think I can blame the civilians who tried to survive in that sub­

terranean world. They didn't have the civilian survival manual back then,

they didn't have Radio Free Earth. It was the Great Panic. Maybe a few

souls who thought they knew those tunnels decided to make a go of it, a

few more followed them, then a few more. The word spread, "it's safe un­

derground." A quarter million in all, that's what the bone counters have

determined, two hundred and fifty thousand refugees. Maybe if they had

been organized, thought to bring food and tools, even had enough sense to

seal the entrances behind them and make damn sure those coming in

weren't infected ...

How can anyone claim that their experience .can compare to what we

endured? The darkness and the stink ... we had almost no night vision

goggles, just one pair per platoon, and that's if you were lucky. Spare bat­

teries were in short supply for our electric torches, too. Sometimes there

was only one working unit for an entire squad, just for the point man, cut­

ting the darkness with a red-coated beam.

WORLD WAR Z 311

The air was toxic with sewage, chemicals, rotting flesh ... the gas masks were a joke, most of the filters had long expired. We wore anything we could find, old military models, or firefighting hoods that covered your en­ tire head, made you sweat like a pig, made you deaf as well as blind. You never knew where you were, staring through that misty visor, hearing the muffled voices of your squad mates, the crackle of your radioman.

We had to use hardwired sets, you see, because airwave transmissions were too unreliable. We used old telephone wire, copper, not fiber optic. We would just rip it off the conduits and keep massive rolls with us to ex­ tend our range. It was the only way to keep in contact, and, most of the time, the only way to keep from becoming lost.

It was so easy to become lost. All the maps were prewar and didn't take into account the modifications the survivors had made, all the intercon­ necting tunnels and alcoves, the holes in the floor that would suddenly open up in front of you. You would lose your way, at least once a day, some­ times more, and then have to trace your way back down the communica­ tions wire, check your location on the map, and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Sometimes it was only a few minutes, sometimes hours, or even days.

W hen another squad was being attacked, you would hear their cries over the radio or echoing through the tunnels. The acoustics were evil; they taunted you. Screams and moans came from every direction. You never knew where they were coming from. At least with the radio, you could try, maybe, to get a fix on your comrades' position. If they weren't panicked, if they knew where they were, if you knew where you were ...

The running: you dash through the passageways, bash your head on the ceiling, crawl on your hands and knees, praying to the Virgin with all your might for them to hold for just a little longer. You get to their position, find it is the wrong one, an empty chamber, and the screams for help are still a long way off.

And when you arrive, maybe to find nothing but bones and blood. Maybe you are lucky to find the zombies still there, a chance for ven­ geance ... if it has taken a long time to reach them, that vengeance must now include your reanimated friends. Close combat. Close like so ...

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!He leans across the table, pressing his face inches away from

mine.I

No standard equipment; whatever one believed would suit him. There

were no firearms, you understand. The air, the gas, it was too flammable.

The fire from a gun ...

[He makes the sound of an explosion.I

We had the Beretta-Grechio, the Italian air carbine. It was a wartime

model of a child's carbon dioxide pellet gun. You got maybe five shots, six

or seven if it was pressed right up to their heads. Good weapon, but always

not enough of them. And you had to be careful! If you missed, if the ball

struck the stone, if the stone was dry, if you got a spark ... entire tunnels

would catch, explosions that buried men alive, or fireballs that melted

their masks right to their faces. Hand to hand is always better. Here ...

!He rises from the table to show me something on his mantel­

piece. The weapon's l'landle is encased in a semicircular steel

ball. Protruding from this ball are two 8-inch steel spikes at

right angles from each other.I

You see why, eh? No room to swing a blade. Quick, through the eye, or

over the top of the head.

!He demonstrates with a quick punch and stab combination.I

My own design, a modem version of my great-grandfather's at Verdun,

eh? You know Verdun-"On ne passe pas"-They shall not pass!

!He resumes his lunch.I

No room, no warning, suddenly they are upon you, perhaps right in

front of your eyes, or grabbing from a side passage you didn't know was

WORLD WAR Z 313

there. Everyone was armored in some way ... chain mail or heavy leather ...

almost always it was too heavy, too suffocating, wet leather jackets and

trousers, heavy metal chain-link shirts. You try to fight, you are already ex­

hausted, men would tear off their masks, gasping for air, inhaling the stink.

Many died before you could get them to the surface.

I used greaves, protection here (gestures to his forearms) and gloves,

chain-covered leather, easy to remove when not in combat. They were my

own design. We didn't have the American battle uniforms, but we did

have your marsh covers, the long, high waterproof boots with the bite­

proof fiber sewn into the lining. We needed those.

The water was high that summer; the rains were coming hard and the

Seine was a raging torrent. It was always wet. There was rot between your

fingers, your toes, in your crotch. The water was up to your ankles almost

all the time, sometimes up to your knees or waist. You would be on point,

walking, or crawling-sometimes we had to crawl in the stinking fluid up

to our elbows. And suddenly the ground would just fall away. You would

splash, headfirst, into one of those unmapped holes. You only had a few

seconds to right yourself before your gas mask flooded. You kicked and

thrashed, your comrades would grab you and haul fast. Drowning was the

least of your worries. Men would be splashing, struggling to stay afloat with

all that heavy gear, and suddenly their eyes would bulge, and you'd hear

their muffled cries. You might feel the moment they attacked: the snap or

tear and suddenly you fall over with the poor bastard on top of you. If

he wasn't wearing the marsh covers ... a foot is gone, the whole leg; if he

had been crawling and went in face-first ... sometimes that face would

be gone.

Those were times when we called a full retreat to a defensive position

and waited for the Cousteaus, the scuba divers trained to work and fight

specifically in those flooded tunnels. With only a searchlight and a shark

suit, if they were lucky to get one, and, at most, two hours of air. They were

supposed to wear a safety line, but most of them refused to do so. The lines

tended to get tangled and slow up the diver's progress. Those men, and

women, had a one in twenty chance of survival, the lowest ratio of any

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branch of any army, I don't care what anyone says. 1

Is it any wonder they

received an automatic Legion of Honor?

And what was it all for? Fifteen thousand dead or missing. Not just the

Cousteaus, all of us, the entire core. Fifteen thousand souls in just three

months. Fifteen thousand at a time when the war was winding down all

over the world. "Go! Go! Fight! Fight!" It didn't have to be that way. How

long did it take the English to clear all of London? Five years, three years

after the war was officially over? They went slow and safe, one section at a

time, low speed, low intensity '.

low casualty rate. Slow and safe, like most

major cities. Why us? That English general, what he said about "Enough

dead heroes for the end of time ... "

"Heroes," that's what we were, that's what our leaders wanted, that's

what our people felt they needed. After all that has happened, not just in

this war, but in so many wars before: Algeria, Indochina, the Nazis ... you

understand what I am saying ... you see the sorrow and pity? We under­

stood what the American president said about "reclaiming our confi­

dence"; we understood it more than most. We needed heroes, new names

and places to restore our pride.

The Ossuary, Port-Mahon Quarry, the Hospital ... that was our shin­

ing moment ... the Hospital. The Nazis had built it to house mental

patients, so the legend goes, letting them starve to death behind the

concrete walls. During our war it had been an infirmary for the recently

bitten. Later, as more began to reanimate and the survivors' humanity

faded like their electric lamps, they began throwing the infected, and

who knows who else, into that undead vault. An advance team broke

through without realizing what was on the other side. They could have

withdrawn, blown the tunnel, sealed them in again ... One squad against

three hundred zombies. One squad led by my baby brother. His voice was

the last thing we heard before their radio went silent. His last words: "On

ne passe pas!"

1. The highest fatality ratio of all allied forces is still hotly debated.

WORLD WAR z 315

DENVER, COLORADO

[The weather is perfect for the neighborhood picnlc in Victory

Park. The fact that not one sighting has been recorded this

spring gives everyone even more reason to celebrate. Todd

Wainio stands in the outfield, waiting for a high fly ball that he

claims "will never come." Perhaps he's right, as no one seems to

mind me standing next to him.I

They called it "the road to New York" and it was a long, long road. We

had three main Army Groups: North, Center, and South. The grand strat­

egy was to advance as one across the Great Plains, across the Midwest,

then break off at the Appalachians, the wings sweeping north and south,

shoot for Maine and Florida, then grind across the coast and link up with

AG Center as they slogged it over the mountains. It took three years.

Why so slow?

Dude, take your pick: foot transport, terrain, weather, enemies, battle doc­

trine ... Doctrine was to advance as two solid lines, one behind the other,

stretching from Canada to Aztlan ... No, Mexico, it wasn't Aztlan yet.

You know when a plane goes down, how all these firemen or whoever

would check a field for pieces of wreckage? They'd all go in a line, real slow,

making sure not one inch of ground was missed. That was us. We didn't

skip one damn inch between the Rockies and the Atlantic. Whenever you

spotted Zack, either in a group or just on his own, a FAR unit would halt ...

FAR?

Force Appropriate Response. You couldn't stop, like, the whole Army

Group, for one or two zombies. A lot of the older Gs, the ones infected

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early in the war, they were starting to get pretty grody, all deflated, parts of

their skulls starting to show, some bone poking through the flesh. Some of

them couldn't even stand anymore, and those are the ones you really had

to watch for. They'd be crawling on their bellies toward you, or just thrash­

ing facedown in the mud. You'd halt a section, a platoon, maybe even a

company depending on how many you encountered, just enough to take

'em down and sanitize the battlefield. The hole your FAR unit left in the

battle line was replaced by an equal force from the secondary line a click

and a half behind you. Tha.t way the front was never broken. We

leapfrogged this way all the way across the country. It worked, no doubt,

but man, it took its time. Night also put the brakes on. Once the sun

dipped, no matter how confident you felt or how safe the area seemed, the

show was over till dawn the next morning.

And there was fog. I didn't know fog could be so thick that far inland. I

always wanted to ask a climatologist or someone about that. The whole

front might get slammed, sometimes for days. Just sitting there in zero vis­

ibility, occasionally one of your Ks would start barking or a man down the

line would shout "Contact!" You'd hear the moan and then the shapes

would appear. Hard enough just standing still and waiting for them. I saw a

movie once, 1

this BBC documentary about how because the UK was so

foggy, the British army would never stop. There was a scene, where th�

cameras caught a real firefight, just sparks from their weapons and hazy siV

houettes going down. They didn't need that extra creepy soundtrack. 2

Ii:

freaked me out just to watch.

It also slowed us down to have to keep pace with the other countries,

the Mexicans and Canucks. Neither army had the manpower to liberate

their entire country. The deal was that they'd keep our borders clear while

we get our house in order. Once the U.S. was secure, we'd give them every­

thing they need. That was the start of the UN multinational force, but I

was discharged long before those days. For me, it always felt like hurry up

1. Lion's Roar, produced by Foreman Films for the BBC.

2. Instrumental cover of "How Soon Is Now," originally written by Morrissey and Johnny

Marr and recorded by the Smiths.

WORLD WAR 2 317

and wait, creeping along through rough terrain or built-up areas. Oh, and

you wanna talk about speed bumps, try urban combat.

The strategy was always to surround the target area. We'd set up semi­

permanent defenses, recon with everything from satellites to sniffer Ks, do

whatever we could to call Zack out, and go in only after we were sure no

more of them were coming. Smart and safe and relatively easy. Yeah, right!

As far as surrounding the "area," someone wanna tell me where that

area actually begins? Cities weren't cities anymore, you know, they just

grew out into this suburban sprawl. Mrs. Ruiz, one of our medics, called it

"in-fill." She was in real estate before the war and explained that the

hottest properties were always the land between two existing cities.

Freakin' "in-fill," we all learned to hate that term. For us, it meant clearing

block after block of burbland before we could even think of establishing a

quarantine perimeter. Fast-food joints, shopping centers, endless miles of

cheap, cookie-cutter housing.

Even in winter, it's not like everything was safe and snuggly. I was in

Army Group North. At first I thought we were golden, you know. Six

months out of the year, I wouldn't have to see a live G, eight months actu­

ally, given what wartime weather was like. I thought, hey, once the temp

drops, we're little more than garbage men: find 'em, Lobo 'em, mark 'em

for burial once the ground begins to thaw, no problem. But I should be

Lobo'd for thinking that Zack was the only bad guy out there.

We had quislings, just like the real thing, but winterized. We had these

Human Reclamation units, pretty much just glorified animal control.

They'd do their best to dart any quislings we came across, tie 'em down,

ship 'em to rehabilitation clinics, back when we thought we could rehabil­

itate them.

Ferals were a much more dangerous threat. A lot of them weren't

kids anymore, some were teenagers, some full grown. They were fast,

smart, and if they chose fight instead of flight, they could really mess

up your day. Of course, HR would always try and dart them, and, of course,

that didn't always work. When a two-hundred-pound feral bull is charging

balls out for your ass, a couple CCs of tranq ain't gonna drop him before he

hits home. A lot of HRs got pretty badly smashed up, a few had to be

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tagged and bagged. The brass had to step in and assign a squad of grunts for

escort. If a dart didn't stop a feral, we sure as hell did. Nothing screams as

high as a feral with a PIE round burning in his gut. The HR pukes had a

real problem with that. They were all volunteers, all sticking to this code

that human life, any human's life, was worth trying to save. I guess history

sorta backed them up now, you know, seeing all those people that they

managed to rehabilitate, all the ones we just woulda shot on sight. If

they had had the resources, they might have been able to do the same for

animals.

Man, feral packs, that freaked me out more than anything else. I'm not

just talking dogs. Dogs you knew how to deal with. Dogs always tele­

graphed their attacks. I'm talking "Flies" 3

: F-Lions, cats, like part mountain

lion, part ice age saberfuck. Maybe they were mountain lions, some sure

looked like them, or maybe just the spawn of house cats that had to be

super badass just to make it. I've heard that they grew bigger up north,

some law of nature or evolution. 4

I don't really get the whole ecology

thing, not past a few prewar nature shows. I hear it's because rats were, like,

the new cows; fast and smart enough to get away from Zack, livin' on

corpses, breeding by the millions in trees and ruins. They'd gotten pretty

badass themselves, so anything tough enough to hunt them has to be a

whole lot badder. That's an F-lion for you, about twice the size of a prewar

puffball, teeth, claws, and a real, real jonesing for warm blood.

That must have been a hazard for the sniffer dogs.

Are you kidding? They loved it, even the little dachmutts, made 'em feel

like dogs again. I'm talking about us, getting jumped from a tree limb, or a

roof. They didn't charge you like F-hounds, they just waited, took their

sweet time until you were too close to raise a weapon.

3. Pronounced "flies" mainly because their pouncing attacks gave the illusion of flight. 4. At present, no scientific data exist to substantiate the application of Bergmann's Rule

during the war.

WORLD WAR z 319

Outside of Minneapolis, my squad was clearing a strip mall. I was step­

ping through the window of a Starbucks and suddenly three of them leap

at me from behind the counter. They knock me over, start tearing at my

arms, my face. How do you think I got this?

!He refers to the scar on his cheek.I

I guess the only real casualty that day was my shorts. Between the bite­

proof BDUs and body armor we'd started wearing, the vest, the helmet ...

I hadn't worn a hard cover in so long, you forget how uncomfortable it is

when you're used to going soft top.

Did ferals, feral people that is, know how to use firearms?

They didn't know how to do anything human, that's why they were ferals.

No, the body armor was for protection against some of the regular people

we found. I'm not talking organized rebels, just the odd LaMOE, 5

Last Man

on Earth. There was always one or two in every town, some dude, or chick,

who managed to survive. I read somewhere that the United States had the

highest number of them in the world, something about our individualistic

nature or something. They hadn't seen real people in so long, a lot of the

initial shooting was just accidental or reflex. Most of the time we managed

to talk them down. Those we actually called RCs, Robinson Crusoes­

that was the polite term for the ones who were cool.

The ones we called LaMOEs, those were the ones who were a little too

used to being king. King of what, I don't know, Gs and quislings and crazy

F-critters, but I guess in their mind they were living the good life, and here

we were to take it all away. That's how I got nailed.

We were closing on the Sears Tower in Chicago. Chicago, that was

enough nightmares for three lifetimes. It was the middle of winter, wind

whipping off the lake so hard you could barely stand, and suddenly I felt

5. LaMOE: pronounced Lay-mah with a silent e.

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Thor's hammer smash me in the head. Slug from a high-powered hunting rifle. I never complained about our hard covers anymore after that. The gang in the tower, they had their little kingdom, and they weren't giving it up for anyone. That was one of the few times we went full convent; SAWs, nades, that's when the Bradleys started making a comeback.

After Chicago, the brass knew we were now in a full, multithreat envi­ ronment. It was back to hard covers and body armor, even in summer. Thanks, Windy City. Each squad was issued pamphlets with the "Threat Pyramid."

It was ranked according to probability, not lethality. Zack at the bottom, then F-critters, ferals, quislings, and finally LaMOEs. I know a lot of guys from AG South like to bitch about how they always had it tougher on their end, 'cause, for us, winter took care of Zack's whole threat level. Yeah, sure, and replaced it with another one: winter!

What do they say the average temperature's dropped, ten degrees, fif­ teen in some areas?

6 Yeah, we had it real easy, up to our ass in gray snow,

knowing that for every five Zacksicles you cracked there'd be at least as many up and at 'em at first thaw. At least the guys down south knew that once they swept an area, it stayed swept. They didn't have to worry about rear area attacks like us. We swept every area at Least three times. We used everything from ramrods and sniffer Ks to high-tech ground radar. Over and over again, and all of this in the dead of winter. We Lost more guys to frostbite than to anything else. And still, every spring, you knew, you just knew ... it'd be like, "oh shit, here we go again." I mean, even today, with all the sweeps and civilian volunteer groups, spring's like winter used to be, nature Letting us know the good life's over for now.

Tell me about liberating the isolated zones.

Always a hard fight, every single one. Remember these zones were still under siege, hundreds, maybe even thousands. The people holed up in the

6. Figures on wartime weather patterns have yet to be officially determined.

WORLD WAR z 321

twin forts of Comerica Park/Ford Field, they must have had a combined moat-that's what we called them, moats-of at least a million Gs. That was a three-day slugfest, made Hope look Like a minor skirmish. That was th� only time I ever really thought we were gonna be overrun. They piled up so high I thought we'd be buried, literally, in a Landslide of corpses. Battles like that, they'd leave you so fried, just wasted, body and mind. You'd want to sleep, nothing more, not eat or bathe or even fuck. You'd just want to find someplace warm and dry, close your eyes, forget every­ thing.

What were the reactions of the people who you liberated?

Kind of a mix. The military zones, that was pretty low-key. A lot of formal ceremonies, raising and lowering of flags, "I relieve you, sir-I stand re­ lieved," shit like that. There was also a little bit of wienie wagging. You know "we didn't need any rescuing" and all. I understand. Every grunt wants to be the one riding over the hill, no one likes to be the one in the fort. Sure you didn't need rescuing, buddy.

Sometimes it was true. Like the zoomies outside of Omaha. They were a strategic hub for airdrops, regular flights almost on the hour. They were ac­ tually living better than us, fresh chow, hot showers, soft beds. It almost felt like we were being rescued. On the other hand, you had the jarheads at Rock Island. They wouldn't let on how rough they had it, and that was cool with us. For what they went through, bragging rights was the least we could give them. Never met any of them personally, but I've heard the stories.

What about the civilian zones?

Different story entirely. We were so the shit! They'd be cheering and shouting. It was like what you'd think war was supposed to be, those old black-and-whites of Gis marching into Paris or wherever. We were rock stars. I got more ... well ... if there's a bunch of little dudes between here and the Hero City that happen to look like me ... Ila ughs.I

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But there were exceptions.

Yeah, I guess. Maybe not all the time but there'd be this one person, this angry face in the crowd screaming shit at you. "What the fuck took you so long?" "My husband died two weeks ago!" "My mother died waiting for you!" "We lost half our people last summer!" "Where were you when we needed you?" People holding up photos, faces. When we marched into Janesville, Wisconsin, someone was holding up a sign with a picture of a smiling little girl. The words above it read "Better late than never?" He got beat down by his own people; they shouldn't have done that. That's the kind of shit we saw, shit that keeps you awake when you haven't slept in five nights.

Rarely, like, blue-moon rarely, we'd enter a zone where we were totally not welcome. In Valley City, North Dakota, they were like, "Fuck you, army! You ran out on us, we don't need you!"

Was that a secessionist zone?

Oh no, at least these people let us in. The Rebs only welcomed you with gunshots. I never got close to any of those zones. The brass had special units for Rebs. I saw them on the road once, heading toward the Black Hills. That was the first time since crossing the Rockies that I ever saw tanks. Bad feeling; you knew how that was gonna end.

There's been a lot of stories about questionable survival methods used by

certain isolated zones.

Yeah, so? Ask them about it.

Did you see any?

Nope, and I didn't want to. People tried to tell me about it, people we lib­ erated. They were so wound up inside, they just .wanted to get it off their chests. You know what I used to say to them, "Keep it on your chest, your war's over." I didn't need any more rocks in my ruck, you know?

WORLD WAR z 323

What about afterward? Did you talk to any of those people?

Yeah, and I read a lot about the trials.

How did they make you feel?

Shit, I don't know. Who am I to judge those people? I wasn't there, I didn't have to deal with that. This conversation we're having now, this question of"what if," I didn't have time for that back then. I still had a job to do.

I know historians like to talk about how the U.S. Army had such a low casualty rate during the advance. Low, as in compared to other countries, China or maybe the Russkies. Low, as in only counting the casualties caused by Zack. There were a million ways to get it on that road and over two-thirds weren't on that pyramid.

Sickness was a big one, the kinds of diseases that were supposed to be gone, like, in the Dark Ages or something. Yeah, we took our pills, had our shots, ate well, and had regular checkups, but there was just so much shit everywhere, in the dirt, the water, in the rain, and the air we breathed. Every time we entered a city, or liberated a zone, at least one guy would be gone, if not dead then removed for quarantine. In Detroit, we lost a whole platoon to Spanish flu. The brass really freaked on that one, quarantined the whole battalion for two weeks.

Then there were mines and booby traps, some civilian, some laid during our bugout west. Made a lot of sense back then. Just seed mile after mile and wait for Zack to blow himself up. Only problem is, mines don't work that way. They don't blow up a human body, they take off a leg or ankle or the family jewels. That's what they're designed for, not to kill people, but to wound 'em so the army will spend valuable resources keeping them alive, and then send 'em home in a wheelchair so Ma and Pa Civilian can be reminded every time they see 'em that maybe supporting this war isn't such a good idea. But Zack has no home, no Ma and Pa Civilian. All con­ ventional mines do is create a bunch of crippled ghouls that, if anything, just makes your job that much harder because you want them upright and

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easy to spot, not crawling around the weeds waiting to be stepped on like land mines themselves. You couldn't know where most mines were; a lot of the units that set them during the retreat hadn't marked them correctly or had lost their coordinates or simply weren't alive anymore to tell you. And then you had all those stupid fuckin' LaMOE jobs, the punji stakes and trip-wired shotgun shells.

I lost a buddy of mine that way, in a Wal-Mart in Rochester, New York. He was born in El Salvador but grew up in Cali. You ever heard of the Boyle Heights Boyz? They were these hard-core LA bangers who were de­ ported back to El Salvador because they were technically illegal. My buddy was plopped there right before the war. He fought his way back up through Mexico, all during the worst days of the Panic, all on foot with nothing but a machete. He didn't have any family left, no friends, just his adopted home. He loved this country so much. Reminded me of my grandpa, you know, the whole immigrant thing. And then to catch a twelve-gauge in the face, probably set by a LaMOE who'd stopped breathing years before. Fuckin' mines and booby traps.

And then you just had accidents. So many buildings had been weakened from the fighting. Throw in years of neglect, and foot after foot of snow. Whole roofs collapsed, no warning, whole structures just tumbling down. I lost someone else like that. She had a contact, a feral running at her across an abandoned auto garage. She fired her weapon, that's all it took. I don't know how many pounds of snow and ice brought that roof down. She was ... we were ... close, you know. We never did anything about it. I guess we thought that would make it "official." I guess we thought it would make it easier in case something happened to one of us.

!He looks over at the bleachers, smiling at his wife.I

Didn't work.

!He takes a moment, a long breath.I

And then there were psych casualties. More than anything else com­ bined. Sometimes we'd march into barricaded zones and find nothing but

WoRLD WAR Z 325

rat-gnawed skeletons. I'm talking about the zones that weren't overrun, the ones that fell to starvation or disease, or just a feeling that tomorrow wasn't worth seeing. We once broke into a church in Kansas where it was

clear the adults killed all the kids first. One guy in our platoon, an Amish

guy, used to read all their suicide notes, commit them to memory, then give

himself this little cut, this tiny half-inch nick somewhere on his body so he

would "never forget." Crazy bastard was sliced from his neck to the bottom

of his toes. When the LT found out about it ... sectioned eight his ass

right outa there.

Most of the Eight Balls were later in the war. Not from the stress,

though, you understand, but from the lack of it. We all knew it would be

over soon, and I think a lot of people who'd been holding it together for so

long must've had that little voice that said, "Hey, buddy, it's cool now, you

can let go."

I knew this one guy, massive 'roidasaurus, he'd been a professional

wrestler before the war. We were walking up the freeway near Pulaski, New

York, when the wind picked up the scent of a jackknifed big rig. It'd been

loaded with bottles of perfume, nothing fancy, just cheap, strip mall scent.

He froze and started bawlin' like a kid. Couldn't stop. He was a monster

with a two grand body count, an ogre who'd once picked up a G and used

it as a club for hand-to-hand combat. Four of us had to carry him out on a

stretcher. We figured the perfume must have reminded him of someone.

We never found out who.

Another guy, nothing special about him, late forties, balding, bit of a

paunch, as much as anyone could have back then, the kinda face you'd

see in a prewar heartburn commercial.'We were in Hammond, Indiana,

scoutiI'l.g defenses for the siege of Chicago. He spied a house at the end of

a deserted street, completely intact except for boarded-up windows and a

crashed-in front door. He got a look on his face, a grin. We should have

known way before he dropped out of formation, before we heard the shot.

He was sitting in the living room, in this worn, old easy chair, SIR be­

tween his knees, that smile still on his face. I looked up at the pictures on

the mantelpiece. It was his home.

Those were extreme examples, ones that even I could have guessed. A

. !

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lot of the others, you just never knew. For me, it wasn't just who was crack­ ing up, but who wasn't. Does that make sense?

One night in Portland, Maine, we were in Deering Oaks Park, policing piles of bleached bones that had been there since the Panic. Two grunts pick up these skulls and start doing a skit, the one from Free to Be, You and Me, the two babies. I only recognized it because my big brother had the record, it was a little before my time. Some of the older Grunts, the Xers, they loved it. A little crowd started gathering, everyone laughing and howling at these two skulls. "Hi-Hi-I'm a baby.-Well what do you think I am, a loaf'a bread?" A nd when it was over, everyone spontaneously burst into song, "T here's a land that I see ... " playing femurs like goddamn banjos. I looked across the crowd to one of our company shrinks. I could never pronounce his real name, Doctor Chandra-something.7 I made eye contact and gave him this look, like "Hey, Doc, they're all nut jobs, right?" He must have known what my eyes were asking because he just smiled back and shook his head. That really spooked me; I mean, if the ones who were acting loopy weren't, then how did you know who'd really lost it?

Our squad leader, you'd probably recognize her. She was in The Battle of the Five Colleges. Remember the tall, amazon chick with the ditch blade, the one who'd sung that song? She didn't look like she used to in the movie. She'd burned off her curves and a crew cut replaced all that long, thick, shiny black hair. She was a good squad leader, "Sergeant Avalon." One day we found a turtle in a field. Turtles were like unicorns back then, you hardly saw them anymore. Avalon got this look, I don't know, like a kid. She smiled. She never smiled. I heard her whisper something to the turtle, I thought it was gibberish: "Mitakuye Oyasin." I found out later that it was Lakota for "all my relations." I didn't even know she was part Sioux. She never talked about it, about anything about her. A nd suddenly, like a ghost, there was Doctor Chandra, with that arm. he always put around their shoulders and that soft, no-big-deal offer of "C'mon, Sarge, let's grab a cup of coffee."

7. Major Ted Chandrasekhar.

WORLD WAR z 327

T hat was the same day the president died. He must have also heard that little voice. "Hey, buddy, it's cool now, you can let go." I know a lot of people weren't so into the VP, like there was no way he could replace the Big Guy. I really felt for him, mainly 'cause I was now in the same position. With Avalon gone, I was squad leader.

It didn't matter that the war was almost over. There were still so many battles along the way, so many good people to say good-bye to. By the time we reached Yonkers, I was the last of the old gang from Hope. I don't know how I felt, passing all that rusting wreckage: the abandoned tanks, the crushed news vans, the human remains. I don't think I felt .much of any­ thing. Too much to do when you're squad leader, too many new faces to take care of. I could feel Doctor Chandra's eyes boring into me. He never came over though, never let on that there was anything wrong. When we boarded the barges on the banks of the Hudson, we managed to lock eyes. He just smiled and shook his head. I'd made it.